Tuesday, November 04, 2008

A VISION OF AMERICA

One thing that has struck me throughout this season, including at the RNC and DNC, and during the respective candidate speeches tonight is the remarkable contrast in the crowds that each drew. Obama's crowd in Grant Park looks like America, at least the America I see everyday. It's diverse. Compare that with the portrait of America gathered in Arizona. I think that says volumes about one factor that made this Obama victory possible.

"In the last two presidential elections, the American people divided down the middle, producing a both a geographical and a demographic divide that seemed increasingly set in stone. Blue Democratic America consisted of the west and the east coasts plus the upper Midwest. Red Republican America covered the swaths in between. Women, minorities, the poor and the highly educated voted Democratic. Men, white people, the rich and the religious delivered for the Republicans. In the mind of Mr Bush's strategist Karl Rove this division was the template of 21st century American politics, a base for a conservative counter-attack against 20th-century liberalism.

Rove's America was not just turned on its head yesterday. It was broken up and recast in a very different mould. One of Mr Obama's many achievements has been his refusal to accept the permanence of the blue-red divide. He has reached out across the divide to states and voters that the embattled Democratic party of the Reagan-Bush years had forgotten about, places like the South and the Rockies, voters like farmers and small business people."